From the get go, I need to be very clear about three things:
- I won’t be discussing any games in which the protagonist is solely male or female, nor any game that swaps protagonists during the game narrative, so Tomb Raider, Duke Nukem, and Bioshock: Infinite and it’s DLC are off limits.
- There will be a much more authorial voice in this article, so bias will be inevitably present due to this being more my opinion thrown into the social melting pot. *The proposals and opinions I Neil H. Howard put forward here are not necessarily shared by GamerHeadlines or its parent companies.
- I am a man, this is a male prospective. The statements and opinions in this article are very much that of a male gamer, so please keep that I’m aware of this in mind.
So, there is a lot of criticism being thrown at the gaming industry at the moment for the portrayal of women in the medium, both on an aesthetic level and on a personality portrayal level. I know many female gamers who haven’t complained about the portrayal of women in the video-games they play. Usually the games they praise are those of narrative complexity at the forefront of the experience, and well interwoven characters of all genders. These women would point at The Walking Dead or Commander Sheppard in Mass Effect. In an previous article I praised the experience I had replaying the Mass Effect trilogy as an evil, red-head, lesbian and I was blown away by who well this contrived set-up I had created still worked in Bioware’s portrayal of a female leader.
Mass Effect like many of the other games I’ll be talking about are all RPGs (Role-playing games) which is often a key piece of defining information that a lot of critics seem to overlook, these games are designed to allow for escapist immersion via the injection into a fictional role. There is something to be said about being a 23 year old male, playing not only a character of another gender, but of a different sexual orientation and moral compass to make choices with. But there are two levels of alienation that occur between me and commander Sheppard in this scenario. I am male playing a female character, and this isn’t the best representation of women in the gaming world to begin with. When I praise it, I praise it for how she doesn’t fall into certain troupes that a lot of female characters do. She is only provocatively dressed when the story calls for it, she isn’t subservient to a male leader, and she isn’t for lack of a better word, ditsy. She is as intelligent as the writers were whilst writing her, along with her male counterpart. Her morality is yours, her skill is yours, most of her actions and inclinations are down to you the player and the choices you make.
But Mass Effect falls flat on one note, with the sole exception of the relationship dynamics in the games, your gender has almost no influence on the games narrative. One could argue that the Mass Effect future is more akin to the Star Trek styled utopia of the future with the abolishment of racism and sexism, I don’t quite buy it. Where Star Trek had to be very cautious with its morality tales in the 1960s, Mass Effect is post-millennial, we can talk about these topics openly, case in point, this article. The game is littered with themes of Sexual-dimorphism and the lack thereof in the Asari race in the game. Themes of segregation and interspecies relations is at the forefront of the games narrative. So to completely gloss over human racism and sexism is a bit of a cop-out in my opinion when the game could have done it justice.
Mass Effect isn’t alone, I recently replayed Deus Ex: Invisible War as a white female, please remember that I played as a ‘white’ female. I know the Deus Ex franchise like the back of my hand, so I was very interested to see what Deus Ex: Invisible War did differently when played as a female. You know what I found? With the exception to some incidental dialog blurted by random passersby, there is only one difference to the entire experience. There is a mission in which the player must gain access to a penthouse in Seattle. To get access to the penthouse you can do one of two things, seduce it out the male owner, or buy it from a disgruntled worker. Now here is the core change, the penthouse owner is gay. Only the male protagonist can seduce the owner, if you attempt to do the same as the female protagonist, all you get is a “not interested, honey” quote. Seriously. Now remember when I mentioned I played at a white female. Well the penthouse owner is black. It makes, absolutely no differences what race you play as, only your gender. I ask you why? Gender and sexual orientation matter but race doesn’t? Surely that’s a little morally questionable. Now don’t get me wrong, I get it. The game would have gotten ripped apart for involving race politics into the game, let alone a homosexual side character. Mass effect acknowledges sexual orientation, but again not race. I really want to invite someone to do an article about the portrayal of race in video-games. I personally don’t think I’m the person to do that analysis.
A problem that both Mass Effect and Deus Ex: Invisible War share is that the characters have voice actors, Jennifer Hale and Laura Bailey respectively. Both are amazing voice talent, but a problem with applying a voice to a character is that any emotional context that is given by the actor will carry over and imprint on the scene in the game. It doesn’t matter what you choose to say, you have no control over the context in which it is said. I think there is a terrible irony that we search to find a voice for female portrayal in video-games, yet oddly enough the best portrayals; are the voiceless ones.
Enter Fallout 3. and Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines. You get to choose your gender the moment your character is born, you get to design the facial appearance of your character, but you don’t get any control over the physical build. But your gender matters in this game. Your dialog options can change depending on your gender, your perks will change too. However one thing that these games do acknowledge is something much more devious, the abuse of sexuality to gain a goal. More so in Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, the female characters in the game including yourself if you choose to play as female can and most often non-playable characters do abuse their sexual prowess and appearance to through the player off. These games take on-board the notion that women are just set dressing in video-games and turns the notion on its head, by making these women much smarter than they look. This for me justifies that games use of provocative outfits for both male and female characters. It serves the story, its manipulation at its finest, and is something that must be experienced to be believed. The games cover girl, Jeanette Voreman is dressed like a promiscuous school girl, everyone wants to please her, everyone wants to be her friend, but everyone will be fooled.
The final point I want to get out and get people discussing is trans-gendered characters in gaming, or more importantly the lack thereof and misrepresentation of the few that exist. Most people versed with the issue of trans-gendered game characters will be familiar with, Poison. Possibly the first trans-gendered video-game character in existence. Luckily for her, she has no real personality to mess up. So as far as misrepresentation goes, it’s more in the eyes of the public, as many distributors changed her bio in the games insert to read as either a cross-dresser or straight up female. The only game, I know of to date, that allows for the player to freely choose to play as a trans-gendered character is Saint’s Row IV. Let that sink in a second, that is the only game that allows you to play as trans-gendered. A game about freedom, lack of seriousness, satire, and fun. -Well maybe that’s the point all along.
Remember, the image above is a man. It stands to argue that for this man to feel like the women he wants to be, he has to become just as objectified as the other female characters in the game. But if we’re going to talk about street fighter, then we’d have to talk about eastern sexual dynamics, and that is a talk for another time.
At the end of the day, the problem is that there isn’t enough out spoken hardcore female gamers talking about what they think, they are after all consumers, not activists that may not even be gamers at all. There aren’t enough attempts to make social issues, gender issues, race issues, integral to the narrative and gaming experience. I still want to hear what female activists would design if given the money to design a game, I want to see a game about racism and get people to have to make choices and sacrifices because the game is forcing them to use moral muscles they may not have known that they had, and I want to see not just the female gender represented well, but all of the genders, all of the races, and all of the sexual orientations.
